The CENSUS HISTORY PROJECT focuses on the exploration, extraction, and analysis of U.S. Census data for further research purposes. Our users group takes on a critical historical approach to understanding population-level data on the United States, the methods used to gather the data, and the measures applied to explore, extract, and analyze the data.

Group Info

primary users:

• aj-lab
• census-users

initiated: fall 2022

Project PIs

• Nathan Alexander (Howard University)
• Hye Ryeon Jang (Morehouse College)
• Christopher Agbonkhese (Bates College)

Contributors

• Sayid Achilov (Brown University)
• Myles Ndiritu (Morehouse College)
• Jibek Gupta (Howard University)
• Zoe Williams (Howard University)
• Maxwell Messiah (Dalton)
• Bayowa Onabajo (Howard University)

Contact

Contact us at quant-shop [at] gmail [dot] com

Funding

Funding for this project is provided by Data.org and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Files

• api.R helps new users generate and store a US Census API key.

  • You should never share your Census API key. Follow the steps below:

    • Set up an environment variable to hold your api key with usethis::edit_r_environ()

    • Transfer information into .Renviron (pop-up file)

      • Insert CENSUS_API_KEY='your_api_key' into the .Renviron file

    • Insert your census API key via Sys.getenv("CENSUS_API_KEY")

Images from the U.S. Census Bureau and the California African American Museum¹.

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1. https://caamuseum.org/learn/600state/black-history/blackhistory-on-june-1-1900-the-first-census-of-the-20th-century-counted-2-131-black-angelenos↩︎